Blogs • Josh Pemberton (Blog Scholar 2009)

The university year has finally come to an end; with exams concluding on Saturday. As per usual my blogging activity has been inversely proportional to the number of exams I have had to study for, hence my online silence in the couple of months. I write this, my last Selwyn blog, from Wellington. I left Selwyn almost a week ago and imagine that by now it will be completely deserted - save for a few staff members, a large quantity of luggage in storage for next year, and perhaps the odd left over gnome.

To be completely honest I have no idea how many people read this blog – for all I know I could be writing to myself – nor who my average reader is. If anyone on this page is in their last year of school and perusing the Selwyn website to try to get an idea of what next year has in store – good luck for 2010. I could wax lyrical about what next year has in store and throw in some Hollywood-worthy clichés about friendship, new experiences and so on, but to do so would be to suggest that the Selwyn experience is reducible to words. And quite frankly, it isn’t.

Invariably, some of those who leave Selwyn find it hard to move on and come to terms with the fact that they are no longer residents of the College. However that doesn’t mean that one’s involvement in the Selwyn community ends as soon as one leaves the warm corridors of Whitehead and Sargood and moves into a cold, slightly damp and inevitably overpriced flat elsewhere in North Dunedin. The idea of being a “Selwynite for Life” continues to find relevance amongst those who no longer live at 560 Castle St. Those of us leaving Selwyn this year will spend time in 2010 coaching Selwyn’s sports and cultural teams, teaching the haka and waiata, visiting friends who returned for a second year, or in my case, earning the minimum wage by serving food in the dining hall. I recently visited my brother’s Wellington flat where Selwynites from 2001 and 2002 were still interested in how events against Knox had gone, whether the secret societies they had started in Selwyn still exist, whether Maureen was still cleaning rooms in Whitehead, and so on.

Quite frankly I’m looking forward to a holiday and soaking up some sun and Nelson, but by late February I know it’ll be time to head back down south to Dunedin. I look forward to seeing how the College evolves over the coming years from a distance rather than from inside it. I look forward to visiting these pages in the years to come - hopefully the blog scholars of 2010 will provide us with some online insight into the mood and goings-on within Selwyn, as James, Teriana and myself have sought to do this year.